Syntax and Semantics Babble (S-Babble) is a weekly informal discussion group at UC San Diego on theoretical and experimental aspects of syntax and semantics and related areas such as their interfaces with morphology, pragmatics, and philosophy of language
S-Babble is open to all students and faculty
Speakers are asked to prepare a talk that is no longer than 50 mins and send a title as early as possible, but at least one week before the talk
An abstract of the talk and suggestions for background readings are welcome
Speakers are fully free to choose among the following 3 presentation options
1. Full talk without interruptions except for few brief, specific, crucial clarification questions
2. Beginning of the talk (up to a specified point) without interruptions except for few brief, specific, crucial clarification questions
3. The talk can be interrupted with questions at any time
Tuesday 11 am - 12:30 pm
RWAC 0474 and/or Zoom (email eclem [at] ucsd [dot] edu to be added to our weekly email list to receive Zoom links)
Old Avestan features a cross-linguistically novel type of free relatives: those based on demonstrative-based pronouns, in contrast to the standard definition of free relatives as being introduced by interrogative-based pronouns (Caponigro 2003). In this talk, I will discuss the significance of this novel type of free relatives for formal analyses of this construction, and propose a new account of free relatives at the syntax-semantics interface. I show that this novel analysis minimizes the need for stipulating silent operators as a result of the unique properties of the Old Avestan free relatives, explains diachronic patterns, and has cross-linguistic support.
Word order changes (or scrambling) happen in languages like German, Japanese, Russian. Some theories argue that scrambling is A-bar movement driven by [EPP]. However, scrambling does not seem to have its own semantic/discourse property (e.g., question formation), and grammatical weight is said to play a role in scrambling. In this respect, one might suggest that scrambling is no different from extraposition (perhaps PF-movement) because both operations prepose or postpose words/phrases to the left or right of sentences. To investigate the puzzling nature of scrambling, I will present experimental evidence that scrambling in Korean is island-sensitive to relative clauses and coordinate NPs. However, there was no island sensitivity to complex NPs. Even if I characterized scrambling as "heavy NP"-scrambling in my experiments, scrambling could not escape from island constraints.
Languages like German are said to make a morphological distinction between unique and anaphoric definites [1]. Evidence comes from two types of bridging anaphora. In (1), the bridged noun author can be associated with the antecedent noun book because such mentioning introduces the set of individual authors into the discourse.
(1) John bought a book today. The author is French. (Product-producer bridging)
The indexical mechanism plays a role in identifying the specific author among others. On the other hand, the bridged noun steering wheel in (2) is identified as the unique part of car.
(2) John was driving down the street. The steering wheel was cold. (Part-whole bridging)
We typically know that there are no two steering wheels in a car and the index plays no role here.
If we consider bare NP languages like Mandarin, the bridged noun in (1) cannot appear as bare NPs because there is no DP structure that can host the index [2]. Because there is no definite article in bare NP languages, product-producer bridging in (1) requires demonstratives that project DPs. By contrast, the bridged noun in (2) should appear as bare NPs because the index is redundant or even banned.
However, it has been also noted that there is significant amount of variation among speakers [3], which does not seem to support the claim that bare NPs are unique definites and demonstrative DPs are anaphoric definites [2]. To tackle this issue, I propose to collect empirical evidence using formal judgment tasks that can quantify varying degrees of acceptability. Importantly, I focus on Korean bridging anaphora because it has been said that Korean makes a three-way distinction of definites, namely, bare NPs as unique definites, demonstrative KU as an anaphoric definite, and demonstrative CE as a deictic definite.
[1] Schwarz, F. (2009). Two types of definites in natural language. PhD dissertation, UMass.
[2] Jenks, P. (2018). Articulated definiteness without articles. Linguistic Inquiry.
[3] Dayal, V., & Jiang, L. J. (2022). The puzzle of anaphoric bare nouns in Mandarin: A counterpoint to index!. Linguistic Inquiry.
Wyandot (endonym Waⁿdat) is a polysynthetic Northern Iroquoian language that is thought to be most closely related to Wendat (Kopris 2001, Lukaniec 2018). In all Northern Iroquoian languages bound roots may productively host a large number of affixes. In addition to many optional affixes, all verb roots obligatorily host pronominal prefixes (Michelson 2016). The prefixes encode number and person, as well as inclusivity for 1st person categories and gender for 3rd person categories (Michelson 2016). Pronominal prefixes come in at least three morphologically determined series, sometimes called Agent, Patient and Transitive in the Iroquoian literature. There is a large amount of syncretism of these forms, especially with Transitive prefixes, so that not all logically possible combinations of categorical values are expressible as a distinct pronominal prefix (Michelson 2016).
This talk explores Wyandot data drawn from fieldwork in 1911 and 1912 where the presenter’s relatives were principal consultants, situating the study of Wyandot in a minimalist syntactic framework for the first time. The distribution of pronominal prefixes is examined following the hypotheses of Coon 2025 for Kanien’kéha (Mohawk), a related Northern Iroquoian language. Phenomena such as the stative shift and the correspondence (or lack of it) between Agent and Patient series pronominal prefixes and semantic theta-roles are considered.
Coon, Jessica. (2025). “Invisible Inanimates and Problems for Polysynthesis in Northern Iroquoian”. Ms., McGill University.
Kopris, Craig Alexander. (2001). A grammar and dictionary of Wyandot. State University of New York at Buffalo.
Lukaniec, Megan. (2018). “The elaboration of verbal structure: Wendat (Huron) verb morphology”. PhD thesis, UC Santa Barbara.
Michelson, Karin. (2016). “Iroquoian Languages.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics.
All Babblers are invited to give short informal presentations of data, ideas, or questions related to syntax and/or semantics to kick things off for the year! We encourage you to use this opportunity for group feedback and discussion on any topics or puzzles that you've been musing over lately. Names of those who would like to present will be drawn randomly, and each presenter will have 5-10 minutes (depending on the number of presenters) for presentation and discussion. You are still welcome and encouraged to attend even if you do not have a topic you would like to present.
Using an array of tests, this paper produces a uniquely comprehensive diagnosis for the logophoric interpretation of wh-moved anaphors. The particular wh-constructions investigated here are argued in the literature to provide evidence that intermediate reconstruction sites satisfy Condition A of the binding theory (Barss 1986; Sportiche 2006; Chomsky 2023). Since these wh-moved anaphors are logophors, expressions that do not adhere to binding theory constraints (at least on the surface, see Charnavel 2019), we may dismiss the purported evidence as irrelevant. This paper uses picture noun phrases, the predominant configuration used in the relevant literature to demonstrate intermediate reconstruction for Condition A satisfaction. My explanation of the presented analysis is based on the observation from Pollard & Sag (1992) that an intervening animate can degrade logophors. Assuming the availability of prolog in picture-NPs, as argued by Charnavel & Bryant (2022), the problem of the intervener is circumvented due to wh-movement to a position where the embedded subject no longer intervenes between prolog and its antecedent.
This study investigates how Hungarian-acquiring children understand factivity, focusing on the verbs “tudni” (‘know’) and “gondolni” (‘think’). Unlike English, Hungarian is a factivity-alternating language that allows both factive and non-factive uses of “tudni”, raising questions about how children acquire factivity in such a language. Using a task adapted from prior English-language research, Hungarian children aged 36-54 months heard attitude reports involving negation as clues to the location of a hidden object. Results suggest that by age three to four, some Hungarian children treat “tudni” as factive, while others do not—a developmental pattern paralleling prior English findings. However, children showed limited understanding of the distinction between “tudni” and “gondolni”, suggesting that the factive alternation for “tudni” may obscure contrasts in meaning between the two verbs. These findings raise the possibility that phenomena like factivity alternations may impact the developmental trajectory for children’s acquisition of belief and knowledge verbs across languages.
It is widely accepted that in wh-in-situ languages, there is a relation between the in-situ wh-phrase and its scope position, but accounts differ as to exactly what this relation is. Some have argued that the wh-phrase itself covertly moves to the scope position (e.g., Huang, 1982), others have claimed that the wh-phrase does not move, but that there is still an A-bar dependency between the scope position and the wh-phrase (perhaps mediated by a null operator, as in Aoun & Li, 1993), and still others have said that it is a binding relation rather than an A-bar dependency (e.g., Tsai, 1999). In this paper, we see that these three approaches make different predictions as to the presence/absence of wh-island and D-linking effects in wh-in-situ languages, and by means of a formal sentence acceptability experiment with Cantonese, we show that the predictions of the A-bar dependency account are correct. More specifically, we present evidence that Cantonese exhibits clear wh-island effects, but not D-linking effects, just as would be expected if the relation between the scope position and the in-situ wh-phrase is an A-bar dependency, but without covert movement of the wh-phrase.